X. Fu – Week Six – Cultural Boundaries

Option One: Cultural Boundaries

From this chapter, I found that cultural boundaries are the cognitive consequences from social norms, thoughts, emotions and behaviors. The most appeared evidence through the world is the cross-cultural enterprises, for example, KFC, McDonald’s, and so on. Through my experiences, I think food culture can reveal many cultural adoption traits. For instance, McDonald here is the typical so called “American fast food”, but in China, the fast food tastes similar with more creative hidden menu.

The cultural adoptions and mixtures reveal significantly on food in my daily lives. Also in the United States, the Chinese food is not authentic but tasting mild here. I like both of them. But when I see someone who are not from my race like the same food that I like, I would feel something is in mutual between us as friends.

Of course there are people who may have disagreements on things that we see more differences in culture than from the mutual sides. However, the worldwide enterprises reveal the diver cultural adoptions largely. The obvious evidence around my daily life is MSU campus. When you walk around campus, you can see many diverse groups having activities through the year and they introduce us many different cultural manners and traditions from their countries across the sea.

As I learn more cultures from my international friends here at MSU, it was a great experience to hear stories from their countries and we have mutual thing but in different meanings. For example, gestures are so different in many countries. People use two fingers to show peace, or show a number “two”, or it can mean a photographic pose and so on. Depending where you are at and what you want to present your meanings to others, the same gesture would be understood by others then.

There are many ways to present culture, explain cultural boundaries and try to understand cultural shock, which may bring conflicts between people who are from totally different cultural backgrounds. Cultural borders does not separate people from distances, and cultural manners may bring similarities and differences, which can make the understanding of cultural boundaries less in gap.